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The Mom Test (Asking Good Questions (Important Questions (You NEED to…
The Mom Test
Asking Good Questions
The measure of usefulnes of an early customer conversation is whether it gives us concrete facts about our customer's lives and world views.The mom test:
- Talk about their life instead of your idea (everything around it)
- Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
- Talk less and listen more #
Bad Questions:
- Do you think it's a good idea?
- Would you buy a product which did x?
- How much would you pay for x?
- Would you pay x for a product which did y?
Good Questions:
- What would your dream product do?
- Why do you bother?
- What are the implications of that?
- Talk me through the last time that happened
- Talk me through your workflow
- What else have you tried?
- How are you dealing with it now?
- Where does the money come from?
- Who else should I talk to?
- Is there anything else I should have asked?
Important Questions
You NEED to search for the world-rocking scary questions. The best way to find them is by an experiment. Imagine that the company has failed and ask why that happened. Then imagine it has had a huge success and ask what had to be true to get there. Find ways to learn from those critical pieces. You can tell it's important when its answer could completely change (or disprove) your business. When you talk to customers you should be asking at least one question which has the potential to destroy your business
Startups tend to have multiple failure points, but like to focus over the most interesting ones and ignore the others. Don't do that! You'll miss important questions. #
Product Risk "can I build it? Can I grow it?" - Customer/market risk "Do they want it? Will they pay me? Are there lots of them?"
Some companies have only product risk (gaming companies) while other market. If you have heavy product risk, you're not going to be able to prove as much of your business through conversations. These can give you a starting point, but you'll have to start building earlier and with less certainty.
Learning that your beliefs are wrong is frustrating, but it's progress. It's bringing you closer to the truth of a real problem and a good market. LOVE BAD NEWS.
The classic error in response to an apathetic signal is to step up your game and pitch until they say something nice. Try to understand the nature of their apathy. Is the problem not that big of a deal? are they fundamentally different from your ideal customers? Are they worn out and skeptical from hearing too many pitches? Are they just tired today?
Look before you zoom in!
Everyone has problems that don't care enough to solve. If you zoom in too quickly you'll confuse your learnings because you're biasing their answers. You think you are validating assumptions, but really you just lead them there.
To solve it try to understand how important that topic is! "What are your big problems right now?" Anchor the generics to the past and actions that happened to get out the juice.
Another way is to ask what are they doing to solve that problem. Have they looked into other options? If not than they don't care so much about it...
When you don't know if the problem is a must solve or a nice to have, you can get some clarity by these cost/value questions:
- How seriously do you take your blog?
- Do you make money from it? - Have you tried making more money from it?
- How much time do you spend on it each week?
- Do you have any major aspirations for your blog?
- Which tools and services do you use it for?
- What are you already doing to improve this?
- What are the 3 big things you're trying to fix or improve right now?
Prepare a list of the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person/stakeholder. Update the list as your questions change. In this way you won't stay in the comfort area.
Find Conversations
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Create warm intros
7 degrees of separation. Ask around, everyone knows someone
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Avoiding Bad Data
Compliments
With the exception of industry experts who have built very similar businesses, opinions are worthless. You want facts and commitments, not compliments. The best way to escape the misinformation of compliments is to avoid them completely by not mentioning your idea. If they happen anyway, you need to deflect the compliment and get on with the business of gathering facts and commitments.
Everybody tries to make you feel good, hence give you compliments.
Symptoms:
- In the meeting
- Thanks!
- I'm glad you like it
- Back at the office
- That meeting went really well
- We're getting a lot of positive feedbacks
- Everybody I've talked to loves the idea
If you catch yourself or your teammates saying something like this, try to get specific. Why did that person like the idea? How much money would it save him? How would it fit into his life? What else has he tried? If you don't know, then you've got a compliment instead of real data.
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Pitching is part of all this. When you start saying "No, I don't think you get it" or "Yes, but it also does this" you slip into pitch mode. Just apologise and get back to their issues. If they really want to listen about it just say that you'll tell them at the end of the meeting or loop them for an early demo, you just want to talk a bit more about their stuff before biasing them with your idea.
Fluff
These comes in 3 shapes:
- Generic claims (I usually, I always, I never)
- Future tense promises (I would, I will)
- Hypothetical maybes (I might, I could)
To avoid these anchor the questions to specifics in the past. Ask when it last happened or for them to talk you through it. Ask how they solved it and what else they tried.
Fluff inducing questions:
- Do you ever...
- What do you usually...
- Do you think...
- Might you
- Could you see yourself
These are not necessary bad, sometimes you can use them to transition into more concrete questions.
While using generics, people describe themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are. You need to get specific to bring out the edge cases.
Ideas
Sometimes when you talk the person might switch to your side of the table. They are excited and see the potential, so they'll start listing tons of ideas and feature requests. Write them down, but don't rush. Startups are about focusing and executing on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every one that crosses your desk. Take a moment and dig into the motivations behind the request.
When you hear a request, it's your job to understand the motivations which led to it. You do that by digging around the question to find the root cause. Why do they bother doing it this way? Why do they want the feature? How are they currently coping without the feature? DIG. The same kind of thing should be done foremotions. Any strong emotion is worth exploring.
Dig into features:
- Why do you want that?
- What would that let you do?
- How are you coping without it?
- Do you think we should push back the launch to add that feature, or is it something we could add later?
- How would that fit into your day?
Dig into emotions:
- Tell me more about that
- That seems to really bug you, I bet ther's a story here
- What makes it so awful?
- Why haven't you been able to fix this already?
- You seem pretty excited about that, is it a big deal?
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